


daisies in the dell

by lizzy_stardust_18



Category: Oklahoma! - Rodgers/Hammerstein
Genre: F/M, all references to appearance and decisions are based on the 2019 staging jsyk, truly facing up to the mortifying ordeal of posting oklaheauxma fic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-02-11
Updated: 2020-02-11
Packaged: 2021-02-28 04:27:41
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,938
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22657792
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lizzy_stardust_18/pseuds/lizzy_stardust_18
Summary: Laurey can't let go.
Relationships: Curly McLain/Laurey Williams, Jud Fry/Laurey Williams, another pair if u squint
Comments: 12
Kudos: 19





	daisies in the dell

_Waste not, want not,_ she thought when she stole the dead man’s flannel shirt. 

That was what they called him: “the dead man.” Once they’d carried him off, cleaned up the blood, and Curly had scrubbed (and scrubbed and scrubbed and scrubbed) his hair and face and fingernails, the man they killed had lost his name. His corpse was buried with only a stone to mark its presence, only a stone suggesting a man was once alive under it. (Or at least that’s what she’s heard. She never went to the gravesite.) His nice suit is likely full of dirt now, his skull grinning wider than the sour man had ever done in life. People forgot him once they scrubbed him away, and only remembered him in hushed whispers and looks askance at the young couple walking the dirt roads. 

Few in their insular little town could forget the stain on their white clothing, their wedding day soaked in gore. Her aunt had always joked that the better a girl behaved, the more red she’d get on her sheets on her wedding night. Laurey had always been afraid of her wedding night for that reason. But she wasn’t the one bleeding when she and Curly had clung to each other for support and he’d lain her down gently on her sheets, their faces still painted red with gore. _Picture of a blushin’ bride._ It was a useless sort of penance to consummate without cleaning up, but it was one they felt they needed to pay, pointless as it was. The bleeding was already done when Curly had gasped into her mouth, his lips metallic with another man’s blood. So painfully gentle he’d been with her, but he still brought tears to her eyes when she looked up at him. 

His sweet, warm eyes were swimming with ghosts. 

When they were done, he’d tucked his face into her shoulder and wept while she held him. She’d always thought people who got away with murder might feel good about it, might feel a bit more wicked than they did. She at least thought there’d be a lot less holding on than there was. But she held on to him and twisted her fingers in his curls, and the blood between their bodies sat like a weightless lover on their chests. And she’d held onto him as he tried to wash them clean with his tears. 

Like it or not, she also held onto the dead man. Little bits of him. His shy smile. His ~~_surprisingly gentle_ ~~ touch with callused hands. The little stabs of terror in her stomach. The weight of him in the room, all around her, oppressive and terrifying, as he stalked out. ~~_His gasps against her lips, hot and desperate, see, see how it is_ _._ ~~ His front all covered in blood, like poppies blooming out of his suit. ~~_His hand cupping her cheek_ _._ ~~Him lying dead on the ground. 

Her aunt had fixed her with a searching gaze when she’d asked to help clean out his empty smokehouse. “Ain’t it a bit soon?” her aunt had implored. She’d simply nodded. 

“It’s all too soon.” 

She’d been allowed time alone with his belongings, the few that he had, that is. She’d wondered how he’d managed to live such an austere life. He’d left it clean and tidy. She wished it had been messy, wish his bedsheets had been strewn, possibly crinkled with the weight of a person. But he’d made his bed before he’d gotten all dressed up. Nothing if not diligent, the dead man had been. 

The flannel had hung over his bed, still crinkled up from constant use. She’d picked it up and, in some demented move of a woman who’d lost half her brain, lifted it to her nose. It didn’t smell like him a bit. He’d done the washing up before he’d gone. _Still trying to keep things movin’ forward._ She’d crumpled the flannel up to her face and let out a single sob into it. She let the moment hang in the air before lowering the flannel and getting her wits back about her. She’d slipped the flannel over her shoulders. _Waste not, want not,_ she thought, even though it was useless. Far too much waste and wanting had happened here. 

She’d taken those distasteful pictures down from his walls immediately after, but it wasn’t out of old disgust with them. They looked a bit too much like corpses, hanging there. The room didn’t need more death in it. 

She gathered a pile of kindling together and lit a match at the base. Once the blaze was hot enough to warm her hands, she began to feed the smut to it, woman after woman crinkling up from the flame. She forced herself to watch. They looked like they were writhing in pain, the way a person is supposed to die, rather than lying down and looking up at you with hollow, lovesick, defeated eyes. 

Back when her pa was alive, she’d seen him shoot a filly whose leg had broken. The poor thing was bucking and kicking at the sky, little limbs kicking heaven off of it to no avail. Her pa’s bullet had gotten it right between the eyes. No time for the betrayal to sink in. No room to say goodbye. It was just gone. Gone like a picture, crumbling to embers and floating off on a gust of wind. Laurey found herself reaching for them as they went, her hand begging for some tiny scrap to come back. But to no avail. There’s no greater destruction than fire. Laurey and these pictures know it all too well. 

She and Curly move out of town, obviously. They purchase a little farm at the edge of another town, almost out of the reach of visiting distance. It’s hard to leave Aunt Eller, but she understands why they go. One can only take so many days walking in the street, knowing the whispers that ensue are because of one’s own doing. The blood on her hands drips onto the ground wherever she walks. The gazes of the townsfolk drive her deeper from the streets, away from the thought of any friend but her aunt and her beloved husband. She finds herself reading the Bible and wishing she could talk to Cain. He’d probably know how to shoot whiskey with folks like himself. Maybe a shot or two with him would make Curly’s eyes look less tired all the time. 

Curly works himself nearly to death every day, and if Laurey didn’t know better, she’d think he was doing it to punish himself. But it’s to help him sleep. If he’s anything but bone tired at the end of the day, he wakes up screaming in the middle of the night, gasping words that rhyme and _doctor please call a doctor._ She always pulls him close and strokes him until he whimpers his way back to sleep. She can never tell him it’s alright, but she can shush him and kiss his forehead, and she can keep herself from whispering “we never called any doctor. He’s gone.” 

As for Laurey, she doesn’t tend to have nightmares about the event itself. Her mind doesn’t want to touch it when she sleeps. When the dead man returns to her, he carries a bouquet of roses that blossoms from his chest. He hands them to her and shyly asks her to dance. They dance and dance and then his belt comes undone, and she wakes up gasping a little before rolling over and waking Curly for a kiss. He’s grateful for the interruption whenever she has a dream like that. 

A couple years pass. They find the need for a scarecrow in their field. Curly builds him one day out of straw and a pair of his pants that he ripped while squatting. He bounds up to the house, grinning like a puppy, and whines “Laaauuuureyyy, he needs a shirt! He’s naked as they day he were born!” Laurey laughs and rolls her eyes before kissing him and promises to find a shirt for the scarecrow. She goes to their room and sifts through her cabinet before she finds it. Hidden away from Curly’s knowledge, from her own, even. She’d forgotten this soft flannel. 

She brings it down to the scarecrow and wraps it around his shoulders and buttons it up. Curly approaches without her hearing. “Jesus, Laurey,” he says, but doesn’t tell her to remove it. She gives him a solemn look and he pulls her into his arms. She hugs him back and then heads back to the house, unwilling to cry. She pretends she doesn’t see him stroke the scarecrow. Wasting and wanting are useless pursuits when there’s work to be done. 

The scarecrow is visible from the window, they realize, right before they go to sleep that night. Curly jokes that it’s their angel watching over them, and he christens it Gabriel. Laurey doesn’t call it that. She doesn’t tell Curly that seeing it makes her hear footsteps at night, the footsteps she used to hear outside of her window. She wakes up in a cold sweat now, and she doesn’t understand why he doesn’t. Or maybe she does. Her terror is her own, only felt when it isn’t shared.

The footsteps get louder one night when she can’t sleep. Laurey lies awake heart pounding, hoping that the snap of the dried leaves underfoot outside is just a leftover of the gloom in her mind. _Probably a raccoon,_ she thinks. _Just a dirty rotten nasty raccoon._ But she sits up regardless. 

“Hello?” she calls into the night. “Somebody out there?” 

There’s no answer. Curly lies asleep beside her, out like a light. Figures. She balls her hand into a fist. 

“If there’s a person out there you tell me your business and you tell me it right now!” she says, a tremor betraying the timbre of her voice. 

There’s a moment of stillness before she sees a hand touch the corner of the window, and a single eye peeks in. A haunted, miserable eye. The rest of the face emerges from the shadows, and a howl escapes her before she can stop herself. 

“No!” she wails and covers her mouth. “No, no, no!” She can’t look at him, can’t feel him near now, can’t bear to see the tear tracks covering his face, preserved like yesterday. “No you go on! Get! Didn’t anybody teach you not to go peepin’ in windows? I said, get! I ain’t afeard of you no more, Jud Fry!” 

His name leaves her lips and he slips away, back into the darkness. “Jud,” she whispers again. Her cheeks are wet. She didn’t even notice. “Jud,” she sobs, and the force of the sob that wracks her body bends her in half. “I ain’t afeard of you, Jud.” 

Curly’s warm arms wrap around her shoulders. “Oh Laurey, oh shh, shh,” he whispers and presses a kiss to her temple. “I get ‘em too, you’re safe, you’re safe, darlin’.” She sobs even harder and he rocks her back and forth, kissing her head until she falls asleep. 

She pretends it didn’t happen the next morning, but he presses her. She laughs it off. “I got skeered by the silly old scarecrow,” she says, waving her hand in a dismissive gesture and looking away from Curly. Her eyes settle out the window into the middle distance, onto the very scarecrow she meant. 

The scarecrow, sitting bare as a bone picked clean, only ripped jeans suggesting its former shape. 

_Waste not, want not._


End file.
